Why outsourcing your Business website design overseas is a bad idea

By Shan Balasuriya Posted Date: 2016-01-20

For a lot of businesses today the internet is one of the main communication platforms with customers, this is especially true if your business is a web-focused company (such as an e-commerce site). A company’s business website can act as the sales force, storefront and customer support system. Realizing the strategic importance of a good business website and how it can play an important role in your overall business model is one of the reasons why outsourcing your design overseas (where you have little or no control over it) is a bad ideaThe main reason businesses fall victim to the pains of outsourcing are the so called ‘cheaper costs’. This is not always true – a cheap website built overseas by programmers who don’t adhere to quality control standards can have repercussions. A website or system that is built on poor programming and doesn’t have structural integrity is likely to eventually crash and can result in the loss of data or worst put a huge strain on your day to day business process. The reason for this is that countries that do outsourced development work don’t have conditions in place that require a certain degree of integrity within the website, so they have no incentive to build websites that have clean code and are secure. The result of a website that has suddenly crashed can be more costly than having spent a little extra money to get the job done through a reputed developer that provides reliable support. Below are some of the reasons why outsourcing your website design is not the best plan:

Outsourced projects can be copied with some small changes and sold to one of your competitors; as a result you can have problems with licensing and copy right.

Significant time is wasted managing a project, the savings in cost must be compared against the time spent trying to manage the development of a project on the other side of the world. Communicating and relaying requirements can be a daunting task.

The lack of quality control and poor standard of work. As mentioned earlier the work done overseas may not always live up to Australian standards of quality. This can even result in financial loss since your competitor has a better web solution than you do, resulting in them taking a portion of your business.

Customer service and on-going support – this is probably one of the major issues with outsourcing web development overseas. Getting in touch with someone once they’ve received payment for the project is next to impossible. If you face problems with your website or even want to make a small change, the hassle and stress of trying to get in touch with the original developers is crazy. They almost always disappear after the project making support for your website non-existent.

Data security – If your website interacts with customer personal data and makes use of databases that handle sensitive information then outsourcing your development project can mean significant risks to data security and confidentiality. Unlike Australia most of countries that do outsourced development work don’t have strict data protection laws that are adhered to.